Redox metal ions play the crucial role in versatile advanced oxidation technologies, in which controlling the active species formation through catalyst design is one of the key challenges in oxidant utilization. This work describes an example of different active species formations in CuO-mediated degradation just because of supporting material differences. Although three CuO catalysts were prepared by similar procedures, it was found that CuO-MgO catalyst demonstrated high efficiency in phenol degradation with bicarbonate activated H2O2, in which the superoxide radical is crucial, while hydroxyl radical and singlet oxygen are ignorable. For the CuO-MgO-Al2O3 and CuO-Al2O3 catalysts, the degradation proceeds by popular hydroxyl radical based process, however, the efficiency was poor. The EPR experiments also confirmed the absence of hydroxyl radical in CuO-MgO system but its presence in CuO-MgO-Al2O3 and CuO-Al2O3 system. The high catalytic efficiency with ignorable hydroxyl radical in the CuO-MgO system leads us to propose that an alternative Cu(III) species dominates the degradation. The basic MgO support may facilitate the formation of the Cu(III) species, whereas the neutral MgO-Al2O3 and acidic Al2O3 supports are unable to stabilize the high valent Cu(III) species, leading to the common hydroxyl radical mechanism with low efficiency of H2O2 in alkaline conditions. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.